February 21, 2008
Bloggers MIGHT Just Be Journalists
An exciting signal moment for bloggers this week, as Joshua M. Marshall of Talking Points Memo won one of the biggest journalism prizes for investigative reporting. Marshall was awarded a George Polk Award for legal reporting for his site's leadership and reporting on the fired U.S. Attorneys scandal last year. The citation: "His site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led the news media coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall (with staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration's bidding."
I've been having the "are bloggers journalists?" debate for three years, ever since my own foray into blogging at the White House, and I've argued that I think most journalists misunderstand the bloggers' side of this debate: Most bloggers aren't interested in doing journalism or being held to the ethical/moral standards of a profession they're not in. Instead, I think most bloggers are in it for fun—to share opinions, write about their lives, blow off steam, etc. At the top of blogging, there's a cream of bloggers who do act like journalists and expect to be treated as such, like Talking Points Memo.
As I've said, over the coming years I think the best newspapers are going to become a lot more like the best blogs and I think that the best blogs are going to become much more like the best newspapers. I'm happy to see that prediction coming true with moments like this where journalism recognizes that the medium where you publish isn't nearly as important as what you publish.
